Christmas 2018 — I invented and created from scratch a new board game for my 16 year old son, Nick, whose favorite music genre (currently) is hip-hop and contemporary rap. The game is called Beat Box Breakdown, and I’m exploring options to fully productize and produce the game for the mass market (so yes, there are trademarks and patents in motion, because that’s how I roll). Here are some pictures, as well as some of the instructions for the game. Your hip-hop journey in Beat Box Breakdown travels in a clockwise spiral as you move from listener to garage rapping to freestyling in local venues to national online acclaim and then opening in national stadiums, culminating in Coachella, Los Angeles and finally opening at the Madison Square Garden....

The Intel® Context Sensing SDK surfaces the power of the Intel Integrated Sensor Solution and advanced sensor capabilities to power mobile, laptop and wearable apps. What if the Intel Context Sensing SDK could be used to understand a drone’s environment and even control a drone? That’s the vision we set out to discover in this demo at Intel® Day Zero Google I/O in 2016. Our demo at the Intel Google I/O Day Zero Pre-Party demonstrated the integration of Intel’s Context Sensing SDK with Intel’s next generation drone platform for the collection and analysis of telemetry and environment sensing data. The demo highlighted how data collected by individual sensors on individual drones can be aggregated and processed for different use cases including authentication and...

I am so impressed with the craftsmanship and creativity shown by the Monohm team with their new “heirloom device,” the Runcible. Even in the first generation of this smartphone, the device no longer feels like a technological interloper on your life. Instead it feels like a natural part of your daily wardrobe, part of your life, and part of your family experience. This is what a “next generation wearable device” should feel like: it should be organic and beautiful. The Runcible device is a round smartphone that fits readily in your pocket, is crafted with care (both software and hardware), and delivers a personalized experience that does not interrupt your life, but instead accentuates what you really care about in your daily experience. I...

Peace or Fear (I’m posting this on the day when a police officer was NOT indicted for choking Eric Garner to death without any overt provocation. Here’s the news story, and the actual video and audio tape) A few years ago, I did a ride along with the sheriffs department in Thurston County. The officer I was assigned was thoughtful, judicious, and extremely diplomatic. He defused about three situations we saw that day. Finally, we pulled up at a domestic violence situation at exactly the same time as another officer. My man turned to me and said “Well, I know this guy, and you’re about to see two different styles of policework here today. ” He was right. My guy walked in to bring the peace. The other guy walked in with the intent to...

FLASHBACK — TWO YEARS AGO… This is an interesting article in Seattle Times written about my commute to California, when I was working for Xerox PARC in Palo Alto. May 18, 2012 at 1:00 AM Trains, planes and Seattle supercommuters By Lora Shinn / Special to NWjobs For two years, technology product manager Ned Hayes would rise before the sun at 4 a.m. every Monday to drive to SeaTac airport from his home in Olympia. He would hop a flight to San Jose, Calif., and arrive at his workplace in Palo Alto just in time for the weekly 9:30 a.m. team meeting. To stay in touch with his family, Hayes read books to his two children over video chat and spoke with his wife using Skype. He returned home on Wednesday or Thursday night in time for dinner. Despite...

New York Times best-selling illustrator and author Nikki McClure and I know each other through our children’s school and our mutual interest in locally sourced art and supporting local artists. Nikki’s son and my children both attended the Lincoln Options Elementary School, and we are both very involved in the local arts community in the South Sound area in the Pacific Northwest. We first met at a Solstice Celebration that featured local children in an impromptu theatrical celebration of the season. Nikki created the cover of Sinful Folk as one of her signature papercut pieces, but went in a new direction for the internal illustrations, which were created with charcoal. After reading the book in 2012, Nikki created her own graphical interpretation of SINFUL...